When the 1,200 construction workers are finished with their jobs — including pouring 500 truckloads of concrete in one week — at the campus in Plano, it’ll be time for 4,000 Toyota employees to move in.

(Andy Jacobsohn - Staff Photographer)

Construction is coming along on Toyota's North American headquarters in Plano.

(
Andy Jacobsohn
-
Staff Photographer
)

Artist renderings of Toyota’s new headquarters in west Plano show lots of wide open spaces and cars on display.

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Toyota
)

A gym at Toyota’s new headquarters.

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Toyota
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Large and small food and drink stations will be scattered around the seven buildings.

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Toyota
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A food station shown in an artist’s rendering.

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Toyota
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A small auditorium at Toyota’s headquarters being built in west Plano.

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Toyota
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Toyota is planning colorful gathering spots.

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Toyota
)

The buildings rising from Toyota’s 100-acre campus in West Plano are about 50 percent complete in what the company now calls its $1 billion move to Texas.

Moreover, the work is on schedule and should meet a completion date of early 2017, company officials said Tuesday at an event at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Toyota announced about two years ago that it was moving its North American headquarters from its longtime home in Torrance, Calif., to Plano.

At that time, the cost of the new campus was expected to be about $350 million. But Toyota officials say that was just an estimate and the actual cost could be significantly higher.

Officials have declined to specify the current cost of the seven-building campus, saying they prefer to view it as part of one large total that includes moving expenses, relocation bonuses and other related costs.

That total is expected to be more than $1 billion.

More than 4,000 employees at Toyota offices in California, Kentucky and New York have been invited to make the move.

The move to Plano will allow Toyota to consolidate all of its divisions at one site for the first time.

Toyota said the 1,200 construction workers at the campus site at Legacy Drive and State Highway 121 have poured as many as 500 truckloads of concrete in a single week.

Last year, the company estimated it would have 600 employees in temporary offices in Plano by the end of 2016.

Now the company says it plans to have 800 employees here by the end of this year, with the rest arriving — or hired locally — by late 2017.

Earlier this year, Toyota CEO Jim Lentz said he was encouraged that up to 75 percent of a sample of current workers expressed some interest in a move to Texas.

If that number holds up, that would mean that about 1,000 job openings could be filled by North Texas residents.